Yesterday, Yeovil Town announced that they had voted for the EFL Trophy to continue in its current guise. I suppose the best way to sum up this decision from my point of view is 'shocked but not surprised'. When last season's competition was revamped, Yeovil Town Chairman John Fry stated that he voted for the competition to be restructured, claiming that the introduction of B Teams 'will appeal to the fans'.

Similarly manager Darren Way repeatedly enthused about the competition. Whilst a number of clubs chose to use the competition to blood Academy graduates, or in our opponents Portsmouth's case to just stick out an entire Reserve Team, Way chose to field a near full first team, and referred to the the Quarter-Final match against Luton Town as one of the biggest games of the season. It's entirely subjective, but I felt that Darren had hyped up a lot of the EFL Trophy games more than he'd done so for our FA Cup matches against Solihull Moors.

So within that context it wasn't a surprise to find the club backing it. What did surprise me was the club's inference that their newly formed Achieve By Unity Supporters Consortium had expressed a 'majority view' that they wanted the competition to continue in its current format. The general view of Yeovil Town supporters (and football fans around the whole country) about the competition has been acidic, with a number of fans actively boycotting the competition because of the inclusion of Premier League and Championship 'B Teams' - based on their EPPP Academy Category One status.

I've given my own views on the inclusion of B Teams in the competition. Football League Chief Executive Shaun Harvey has denied it, but I saw it as a Trojan Horse attempt to introduce Premier League clubs into the Football League competitions, with the idea that once clubs and fans had got used to such B Teams being part of our fixture list, that it would be far easier to persuade Chairmen (along with a few wads of cash) to vote for the inclusion of such teams in the Football League pyramid. Harvey's denials came across as those of a cunning politician, claiming that 'this was never our intention', entirely forgetting that anyone with a decent grasp of google or the Ciderspace archives will tell you that Harvey was at one point telling the media "it’s difficult to count anything definitely in or definitely out" - even to the point of inviting two clubs from Glasgow into the competition. That discussion has been killed for now, but I suspect that only because Harvey realised how toxic the conversation was at that time.

The experience of the actual 2016-17 competition was that the inclusion of those B Teams had a considerable effect upon matchday attendances. But not in the way that John Fry predicted. Around the country, club attendance records were established. Portsmouth had their lowest post-war attendance at Fratton Park, whilst the October 2016 set of fixtures saw matches against B Teams take the bottom six crowds on the evening. When Yeovil Town played Reading Under-21s at Huish Park in January 2017, the attendance of 1,081 was the lowest the club had recorded for a competitive fixture since they entered the Football League.

The Football League had stated that the 2016-17 season competition was merely a pilot, and so recently they gave clubs three possible options - keep the current competition with B Teams in it, go back to the original competition format, or to scrap the EFL Trophy entirely. With this in mind this site ran two surveys on Twitter and Facebook to see how fans saw the three options. The results were fairly emphatic. Around two-thirds of fans wanted the old Trophy format to be returned, whilst only around 6-7 percent of fans liked the B Team format.

It was therefore a bit of a shock to find that the club's new Achieve By Unity Supporters Consortium had apparently given a 'majority view' in a recent meeting, that backed the B Team format. This was also news, because there had been no publicity telling fans this meeting was taking place, nor that the club were going to seek opinions on the subject as part of that meeting. We're told the relevant meeting took place on April 26th, yet there have been no minutes produced to confirm this was discussed, or what other issues were discussed. For the ordinary grassroots supporter, this meeting had no visibility at all. Yet the club's own statement on the existence of the group is "to improve ... the relationship between Yeovil Town Football Club and its supporters". You cannot 'improve' if you do not communicate.

On further digging, it's been disclosed that there was no formal recorded vote on this subject at the Supporters Consortium meeting. Some of those present at the meeting expressed views, whilst others wanted to provide feedback at a later date after they'd consulted their own members. So the club's statement, claiming that a 'majority view' was obtained at the Supporters Consortium is in my view disingenuous and misleading when it's clear that not everyone at the meeting wanted to express a recorded opinion at that stage.

The spin from the club, whose social media announcement on the subject was to emphasise that their 'vote' was "after consulting (the) Supporters Alliance" comes across as a club trying to hide behind the Supporters Consortium, in an attempt to excuse what they knew was going to be a controversial decision. Don't blame us - blame the supporters!

Of course it may just happen that the supporters who were in the meeting happened to be ones that liked the new competition format, and so wanted it to continue. Without the minutes, and those representatives being known, we don't know. However, the sheer swell of numbers who have criticised the competition should surely have reached the club itself, and the representatives to know that this wouldn't be a 'majority view' of the fans as a whole - or that at the very least a wider canvassing of the club's fans would be warranted. The two social media polls this site conducted show why that should have been the case.

I suspect the club's true motives lie with the fact that the 2016-17 competition format increased the available prize money. Indeed they hint at that, stating that they gained "an almost six-figure sum" of money from their participation in the 2016-17 season competition. The actual sum - which is in the public domain - was £85,000. This raised a wry smile from myself, given that the club's usual tact on the back of Wembley play-off finals and player transfer sales, has been to significantly downplay the amount of money they've made out of such an event. This may be the first occasion where I've seen the club actually exaggerate the amount of money they've made out of a competition!

The sums gained should be considered alongside a number of other factors. Our Group Stage opponents Bristol Rovers revealed that their home match against Reading Under-21s produced such a low gate that they actually made an operational loss in staging the fixture. The cost of putting floodlights on, and paying stewards, turnstile operators, tea bar staff etc exceeded what they actually gained on the night. Whilst our club have not been as open on this subject, I suspect that our own matches against Reading Under-21s (attendance 739 and 1,081) will fall into the same bracket. On top of that, for the Luton Town quarter-final the club had to deal with the costs of a postponement, having chosen to put the whole team up on a hotel on the Monday night on both occasions to prepare for the game.

On top of that, it was the second Reading Under-21s fixture that saw Otis Khan pick up a serious ankle injury - considered as one of the significant factors in why our season declined so badly over the second half of the campaign. Meanwhile Ryan Dickson's 79th minute withdrawal at the Luton Town quarter-final with an ankle injury was the first sign of problems for the left-back that saw him substituted in a number of games that followed, and in my view appeared to be struggling in several of the matches he completed. Credit to him for staying out there, but I felt it did have consequences. We'd never played six matches in the Football League Trophy before - the addition of the three group games extended the competition, and with our policy of playing near full-strength sides, you wonder what impact it had on our season in having to play such a concentrated Saturday/Tuesday combination during January and February. So whilst there may be greater prize money, there were both financial costs and intangible costs associated with playing so many games in front of such low crowds.

The £85,000 gained out of this season's competition should also be stressed is no guarantee for future seasons. Suffer a win, a draw and a loss in the Group stages next year, and the current prize pool gives you just £15,000. It was only because we reached the final eight of the competition that we gained such rewards - the Third Round victory over Reading Under-21s gained £40,000. So that's great if you're one of the final eight out of the sixty-four teams - but it means that 56 clubs wouldn't have got those sums. We'd only reached that stage of the competition once before in our club's history (2012-13 season, when we lost to Leyton Orient in an Area Semi-Final) so the chances are we won't earn those sums every year. By using "an almost six-figure sum" as a justifying factor in their statement, they're ignoring the years when we used to get dumped out in the first round.

If the club's thinking is that they're willing to gamble on heavily reduced crowds and disaffected supporters, in the hope that they can chase the bigger competition pool in the final stages, and that they're willing to cope with a heavier fixture list, then be up front and admit that. However, I'd hope their projections are not based on an assumption that the £85,000 from this season would be typical of every season, which it appears to be. However, if they actually do believe that they're acting on a 'majority view' of supporters then I think they're heavily misjudging the mood of fans about this competition format - something that will increase the feeling throughout the fanbase that the club are not listening to the whole cross-section of their supporter base in a coherent manner.

As I have stated elsewhere, I feel the decision of how to vote should have been the Club's alone, based on economies and the Managers views on the value of the competition in its various voted upon formats. I have to say that in my opinion the mainly 'political' views of fans has little relevance. Where the Club have gone wrong is by trying to pretend their decision was fan driven, when that was clearly not so. YTFC... MAN UP AND JUST TELL US WE VOTED THIS WAY BECAUSE.......
11/05/2017 15:33:40

Andrew Foot said ...

Once again, this blog sums up everything very well. The club have pushed a large section of it's supporter base away over the past few years and should be doing anything it can to get some back onside. Decisions - and bare faced lies - such as this are going to push more even further away. Both this format of the competition, and our boards decision to vote in favour of it, show how little regard both our supporters and supporters in general are held.
11/05/2017 16:10:55

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